The more generous was the town the more exacting became the Martyr. He could not get over his free-and-easy way of living in the gay old days when the tithes of his benefice yielded him nigh a thousand yellow crowns a year. He could not see why he was not entitled to have his rents back again; and after a vain effort on the part of the council to make him see it, he went off to Berne, where he had been admitted a citizen, to ask it to interfere for him, sending back an impudent letter renouncing his Geneva citizenship, on the ground that in his reduced circumstances he could not afford to be a citizen in two places at once. For a while the patient city lost its patience with its unruly beneficiary, but the genuine grateful and kindly feeling that every one felt for the poor fellow, and the general admiration for his learning and wit, conspired with his growing embarrassments to bring about a settlement of the affair on the basis of a reduced pension with a round lump sum to pay his debts. They sent for him two or three years later to come to Geneva as historiographer, and he came, bringing with him a wife from Berne, who died soon after his arrival. For a man of his years, he had a remarkable alacrity at getting married, and his second venture was an unlucky one. For from the wedding-day onward, when he was not before the council with some quarrel or some affair of debt he was apt to come before it to get them to compel his wife to live with him, or, failing that, to get her money to live on himself. What time could be saved from these wranglings, which lasted almost till the poor woman's death, was devoted ardently to his literary work. The history grew apace, and other books besides. In the seditions of the Libertine party against the austerities of the new regime the old man took the side of law and order and good morals (in his book on _L'ancienne et nouvelle Police de Geneve_) with an ardor that was the more surprising as one remembered his antecedents. In the midst of his toils he found time to get married to a third wife and to go to law with his neighbors. He is continually coming to the council, sometimes for a little loan to help him with his lawsuits, sometimes for relief in his embarrassments. It is touching to see how tender they are toward the poor foolish old man. They make him little grants from time to time, always looking to it that their money shall be applied to the object designated, and not "on his fantasies." They take up one of his notes for him, looking to see that it has not been tampered with, because "he is easily circumvented and not adroit in his business." He complains of the heat during an illness one summer, and the seigneurie give him the White Chamber in the town-hall, and when winter comes on, and he is old and infirm, they assign him the lodging lately occupied by Mathurin Cordier (famous schoolmaster Corderius, whose _Dialogues_ were the first book in Latin of our grandfathers),